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FYI: Newsday's Unconventional Subscription Model

JANUARY 29, 2010

When Newsday announced last spring that it was contemplating putting its Web site behind a paywall, I wrote a scathing critique of the idea.

I was wrong.

Newsday, as it happens, is in a unique position, and is taking advantage of it. Owned by Cablevision, the paper is circling the wagons around its core news and cable market on Long Island. Its online subscription plan goes like this: If you're a Cablevision cable-TV or Newsday print subscriber, you get access to Newsday.com site for free. If you're not, Newsday wants non-subscribers to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year.

That's a hefty fee, and not surprisingly, just 35 people have signed up for it since the pay wall went up about three months ago—a paltry number that left many observers a-titter and a-Twitter when it slipped out this week.

Yep, Newsday apparently has successfully alienated its non-Long Island audience. But that turns out to have been the idea.

...What Cablevision and Newsday don't want—just don't care about—is non-Long Island subscribers. Buh-bye. Take a hike. Adios. (Or pay $5 a week/$260 a year for access.) Those distant subscribers can't be monetized through local advertising, the reasoning goes, so why bother with them?

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2010/01/newsdays-unconventional-subscription-model.html

http://jour.nali.st/blog/2010/01/31/thirty-five-is-weird-newsday/

http://www.observer.com/2010/media/after-three-months-only-35-subscriptions-newsdays-web-site